A one-time math major at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Alexa Irene Canady wound up graduating with a bachelor’s degree in zoology before she became a national trailblazer in yet another field.
In 1981, the former math major became the first female African-American neurosurgeon in the United States.
The story of her circuitous academic route from math to zoology to a pioneering and innovative career in neurosurgery began on Nov. 7, 1950, in Lansing, where she was born to educated and intellectual parents who aspired to public service.
Her father, Dr. Clinton Canady Jr., a member of the famed Tuskegee Squadron of Black Air Force flyers in World War II, was a trailblazer in his own right.
In addition to serving the country, he was the second Black dentist in Lansing, the first Black member of the State of Michigan Dental Board, the first Black member of the Lansing Board of Fire Commissioners, and a towering community leader in the capitol city.
Alexa’s mother, Elizabeth Canady, was an educator, a civil rights activist, and a national president of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. She also was a founder of the Delta Research and Educational Foundation in Washington, D.C., which serves to benefit African-American women.
Young Alexa excelled at the predominantly White Lansing Everett High School, where she skipped a grade and graduated with honors as a National Achievement Scholar in 1967.
One of her choices for college was the University of Chicago, which accepted her into its honors program.
“I was only 16 at the time, and my mother wouldn’t let me go to Chicago,” Canady recalls. “She didn’t want her 16-year-old to go to Chicago.”
Her mother also initially ruled out sending her to the University of Michigan, to avoid possible competition with her brother.
“He was already there, and I’d been nipping at his heels all along the way (in high school), and I’d skipped a grade and then skipped a math year and ended up in his class,” she says. “My mother believed he had a right to do something of his own.”
Soon after, and with her mother’s approval, Canady enrolled in math at U-M, pursuing her dream of being a mathematician — an idea she’d held since she was 10 years old.
“I liked the orderliness of it, and the thinking process of it,” she says. “It was something I always enjoyed. Of all the things I studied, I most enjoyed that.”
However, by the beginning of her sophomore year, she started having doubts about a career in mathematics.
“I began to get the feeling this really wasn’t my thing. I just kind of knew that I didn’t love it like other people around me loved it,” she says. “I became a little lost in terms of where to go from there.”
She stopped going to her classes, creating a crisis that resulted in a six-month academic probation. Still, she stayed in Ann Arbor that summer, wrestling with her dilemma. Weekly dinner date visits with her father helped pull her out of her funk.
“We never discussed my troubles, but obviously he was there to settle me down, and he did,” she says.
Canady also met other students in her dorm, some of whom worked at the student newspaper, The Michigan Daily. With their encouragement, she joined the newspaper staff.
“That saved me, really. It gave me purpose again and got me out and going,” she says. Eventually, she became the newspaper’s editorial page editor, a welcome diversion while she looked for a new career path.
She considered going into law, but ruled it out as her perception of that profession was that it valued winning and losing, and not necessarily the truth.
Her brother came up with an alternative. He told her about a health science program for minorities in the medical school that paid $400 a month — a considerable sum in those days, considering her monthly rent was $60.
Canady signed up for the program and found herself working in a genetics clinic, where she says she fell in love with medicine.
Eager to graduate on time, given her probation, she switched her major to zoology from math because she discovered that her math courses could be transferred seamlessly toward her new degree.
In 1971, following graduation, she enrolled in U-M’s College of Medicine. Four years later, she received her medical degree magna cum laude, and was accepted as the first Black surgical intern at Yale New Haven Hospital in New Haven, Conn.
Canady says a friend of her father, a supervisor of a Lansing hospital emergency room, arranged for her to spend part of a summer break shadowing a neurosurgeon after she had expressed an interest in that field.
“You really ought to do neurosurgery, not neurology,” she says her father’s friend advised her. “So, that’s how I got into neurosurgery.”
Canady says her love for children steered her to pediatric care. “It’s a different set of diseases, pediatric neurosurgery from adult neurosurgery, and I preferred that,” she says.
After the New Haven internship, the newly minted Dr. Canady spent five years in residency in neurosurgery at the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis. A one-year fellowship in pediatric surgery followed at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, before she returned to Michigan and joined the neurosurgery department at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit (Henry Ford Health).
In 1983, she moved to Children’s Hospital of Michigan in Detroit, part of the Detroit Medical Center. Four years later, at age 36, she was promoted to chief of the neurosurgery department.
During her 18 years at that hospital, Canady worked tirelessly to prioritize patient-centered care — a concept she drilled into staff members, residents, and students.
Years later, at her retirement party, that effort resonated as a former Children’s Hospital patient described her childhood experience with Dr. Canady.
“When she came into my room, I knew she was my doctor and not my parents’ doctor,” the woman told the gathering.
During Canady’s tenure, Children’s Hospital achieved national recognition as one of the top pediatric neurosurgery facilities in the country.
“It was a wonderful place, an absolutely wonderful place,” she says. “It was one of the few places where the hospital administrators and faculty — and we weren’t really faculty, but independent practitioners — were aligned with the same goals.”
She says specialists go into pediatrics knowing they’ll make less money than doctors in other fields; their motivation is their love of children.
“It makes for a wonderful practice environment, and I had great partners,” Canady explains. “We ran it like a team. We had good interaction with all the other specialties, and it was just joyous. The nursing staff was good and dedicated. You couldn’t have asked for a better place to practice medicine. It was medicine for the right reasons, doing the right thing.”
Canady’s constant research into innovative new techniques in neurosurgery led to a major disappointment during her tenure at the hospital.
On July 18, 2000, the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued Canady and two of her colleagues a patent for their invention of a surgically implanted medical device, a shunt system to drain the abnormal buildup of cerebrospinal fluid from cavities inside the brain.
The condition, often referred to as “water on the brain,” can be present at birth or can arise later in life, due to an injury or a disease.
Unfortunately, their invention never made it to the health care market, given they lost out to a better-financed company.
“Some other people came up with another pump, which is the most prominent one now,” Canady says. “So ours, you can say, is lost in history.”
While she was practicing at Children’s Hospital, Canady also served as a clinical instructor at Wayne State University’s School of Medicine. She was later promoted to professor and vice chair of the Department of Neurosurgery.
Among the pages of listings of her awards, Canady received a Teacher of the Year citation from Children’s Hospital and a Distinguished Service Award from Wayne State University.
In 2001, Canady retired, and with her husband, George Davis, a retired U.S. Navy recruiter, moved to Pensacola, Fla.
Her retirement didn’t last long.
While attending neuroscience conferences to keep her hand in her old business, she learned there were no pediatric neurosurgeons in Pensacola. Complex cases involving children were routinely dispatched elsewhere.
Succumbing to pleas for her to return to duty, she agreed to work as a part-time surgeon at a local hospital.
“I had some conversations with the hospital and came up with something that I think worked very well for me,” she says. “It was just me and the kids (a young medical team). I didn’t have any committee assignments. I didn’t have four or five neurosurgeons, or a bunch of nurse practitioners. It was back to neurosurgery in its most pure form, and I loved it.”
Canady continued in that role until her permanent retirement in 2012.
Reminiscing about her career, she’s most proud of the fact that she didn’t let herself be dissuaded from what turned out to be her life’s work.
“Even my parents, ( for) the first time in my life, weren’t too keen on it,” she recalls. “When I came home with this neurosurgery thing, (their reaction) was like, ‘Really, Alexa?’ ”
Today, her early resolve is the basis of the message she delivers to the students with whom she interacts.
“I tell them the world you live in isn’t the world your parents lived in, and the world you live in now isn’t the world your children are going to live in,” she says.
“So, you must understand that when you’re making choices about your future. You have to listen to people, but you have to go where you feel you need to go. And if it doesn’t work out, you tried.”
“YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO PEOPLE, BUT HAVE TO GO WHERE YOU FEEL YOU NEED TO GO. AND IF IT DOESN’T WORK OUT, YOU TRIED.”
— DR. ALEXA IRENE CANADY
